Trolltech has announced the release of Qt 2.3.0, the much-anticipated version of Qt that supports anti-aliased fonts (assuming your X server is up-to-date). "KDE 2.1 automatically takes advantage of Qt's support of anti-aliased fonts. The result is one of the nicest looking user interfaces in the world." Along with anti-aliasing, Qt 2.3.0 offers True Type and Type 1 font support for printing, and a few other improvements. The release was accompanied by an amusing soundtrack. Finally, of note to those of you struggling with fonts, is the Qt font HOWTO, made available by Lars Knoll.

I had a similar problem with RedHat 7.0, but I
found the fix. This is RedHat, but there is
probably a very similar thing happening on your
SuSE system.

Cause: installed KDE 2.x from different sources,
I.E. kde.org and redhat. They put the shared libs
in slightly different places, and you are seeing
some of the older libs.
.
RedHat fix: Notice the lib names in your error.
The qt-2.2.4 stuff should be in /usr/lib/qt-2.2.4.
Remove the kde libs in /usr/lib with the same names as /usr/lib/qt-2.2.4.

One way to see what shared libs kde is going to use is to run "ldd $(which ksplash)"
See if libkdecore.so.3 is coming from an unexpected place.

It worked! I jut copied everything in /usr/local/qt/lib to /usr/lib and /usr/lib/qt.

But. I also noticed that I'm missing the AA'd fonts in Control Panel, even though I have installed & compiled QT 2.3 correctly. I downloaded latest RPM's from Suse's FTP-site. Is the AA-checkbox visible on KDE.org rpm's?

It worked! I jut copied everything in /usr/local/qt/lib to /usr/lib and /usr/lib/qt.

But. I also noticed that I'm missing the AA'd fonts in Control Panel, even though I have installed & compiled QT 2.3 correctly. I downloaded latest RPM's from Suse's FTP-site. Is the AA-checkbox visible on KDE.org rpm's?

I'm glad you like it. It's a theme I've been working on for a while, but it's not released yet. People interested can send me an e-mail or check my KDE page once in a while (http://www.stack.nl/~mth/kde/).

It looks like KDE determines at compile-time whether your Qt supports AA or not. If it doesn't, then the code to handle AA is not compiled in. The good news is that you can just get the source code for kcontrol and reconfigure then recompile/reinstall from the kdebase/kcontrol/display directory. Or complain to the person who made your packages.

I got it to work! Yeah! Anti-aliased fonts. I'm running on a laptop (Toshiba 2805-S202, which, by the way, is a GREAT Linux laptop, and, no, I don't work for Toshiba) and I was wondering, how can one set the anti-aliasing to do sub-pixel rendering instead? I've heard rumors that this was possible. Has anyone tried it?

In the meanwhile, I copied all my Windows fonts (Windows has great fonts. I knew it had to be useful for something...)

the guy who discovered that is just a few miles away from me, and if you've ever seen the example for Windows, it is truly stunning. I asked about this in the kde-devel list and was told they already had the ability to do it (if I understood correctly), but I'll tell you what, if you can get that working with KDE and go to do a demo on a laptop, people will just be stunned.

Wow. Sub-pixel rendering under Linux, with every single piece of text I see being rendered correctly. Now all we need is:

#1 Better hinting under FreeType
#2 Better open fonts
#3 A nice dialog to set this all up under the control panel, in the fonts panel.

I don't know how to make fonts, but I could code the GUI, but I assume someone else has already thought of this and is coding it, or has coded it. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about anti-aliased icons, which should be easier, because they can be just rendered statically, as in, not on the fly.

Recompiling KDE is not necessary. Read the comments above to activate the "use AA" config option if you have KDE 2.1.

You do have to recompile Qt and XFree86. I found out today that just having the RENDER extension in your X server is not enough, /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.1.0 must be linked to FreeType2 for anti-aliasing to work (use "ldd" to check). The XFree86 release notes tell you how to compile XFree86 so that Xft is linked to FreeType2.